This Valley of Dying Stars
by Valieara
Summary: He thinks of hurricane glass, the faithful with their votives, a wall littered with the memories of a few abandoned faces. There is grief here, but there is also acceptance. Bill and his family. A/R, Lee/Kara. Spoilers for all of season 4.5


**Disclaimer:** I own nothing. Ron Moore, NBC Universal, SciFi, _et al_ own _Battlestar Galactica. _The title is from _The Hollow Men_ by TS Eliot.

**Spoilers/Setting:** Spanning all of season 4.5, from _A Disquiet Follows My Soul _to _Daybreak part III._

**Notes:** I began this after _Someone to Watch Over Me_ and didn't finish until now, when I have ten pages to write before tomorrow. Meh. Feedback is always appreciated.

* * *

And voices are  
In the wind's singing  
More distant and more solemn  
Than a fading star

- _The Hollow Men, _TS Eliot.

* * *

He goes to the Memorial Wall late in the day, sifting through base desecration as he moves: trash in the halls and graffiti on the walls, living bodies lying lifeless in empty intersections.

He doesn't dwell on the reversals. He's so tired of antithesis it's an ache in his very soul.

This space, however, remains pristine as ever, the convoluted organized chaos of this almost-shrine a sacrosanct familiarity.

Lee is halfway down the wall, staring at a picture. Adama gets closer, makes out Dee in the true blues of her uniform and ever-straight spine, serious and smiling on Chief Tyrol's hanger deck.

"That's a good picture," he says.

His son sighs, and traces the contours of his late wife's face. He'd watched him do the same after Kara's death. "I didn't put it up. I think it was Gaeta."

Adama doesn't know what to say, but his son continues. "I think… I think this is better," he concludes. "This was how she was best loved. It's a testament."

Words have always been minimalized in times of grief in the Adama family; but for once, Bill understands his son.

oOo

The next time he goes, he goes alone; and his son's words ring through his mind like a reckoning, _this was how she was best loved_. He thinks about Laura and the intensity that emanates from her eyes; and he thinks that something has shifted, subsided, since the discovery of Earth.

He carries an image of her with him wherever he goes, though he's never found a tangible copy in existence. She's wearing a bright red dress, and the recollection of too-sheer sunlight and too-sharp air make her hair all the more red, and her visage impossibly clear to his memory. Haphazard winds pick up strands of her hair, and they swirl about her face as her skirts fly around her body; and for that single static moment, she is motion in immobility and flame mid-flicker. She's smiling mischief and affection, green eyes glinting the intensity of it all, as ever. She has never done anything halfway.

_This was how she was best loved_, he hears, but these are the words behind every picture hung here with as much care as the indignity of thumbtacks allow.

He returns to his quarters to find Laura half awake, and watches her gentling gaze watching him watch her.

oOo

Bill Adama has often wondered about the Wall, once an ode to desperate hope, now consigned to the throes of loss and memory. He's watched the faithful on their daily visits, lighting their votives behind hurricane glass, taking a moment to sit still in the eye of despair.

Two pictures of the same person so rarely appear, and he's wondered at this, too; if it's tacit understanding who chooses and puts the picture up, or if it's just that there isn't enough left of the human race to care about the death of one person.

But that was before he'd seen Kara's picture appear next to Kat's, and then – then he'd understood.

oOo

He'd come home one day to find Laura had collapsed, and had subsequently been taken by the marine guard to sickbay. He'd thought, _this is it_; and it was.

He reads to her in sickbay in between shifts, blessed beyond all reason by her smiles. He remembers her laughing in red and surrounded by a haze of sunlight made of gauze and gold. It's something more-than-icon, but less-than-touchstone: when he reaches and manages to grasp it, he retreats into a reality-that-was, but isn't anymore all the same.

_It's a testament_, had said his son; and he remembers Kara's picture on that wall for three months.

He wishes for the substantiality of that image.

oOo

It's tradition he visits after a military funeral. He's delayed two hours this time, and finds Kara alone when he arrives.

She's smiling sweetly, or sadly; and it's an expression he's never seen the likes of on her face before. Her too-long hair makes her more feminine and boyish in one. She always has been a contradiction.

The sudden wash of peace on her face is at odds with her spirit; and in the face of so much questioning, it's more than a little disquieting. He hears the strained notes she played for him a week ago at Saul's insistence like a distant memory, like a haunting.

He touches her shoulder. "What do you hear, Starbuck?"

She turns slowly, uncalculated, and bestows upon him a beatific smile. She leaves without a word.

He faces the wall to find an impression of his almost-daughter's face where it had been those three months, close-cropped hair and bold cheekbones and wild grin at the Triad table a familiarity, and his heart aches. He can't quite say why.

oOo

"I know you love this ship," his almost-wife says one day, eyes ablaze with determination born of love, too full of one to be entirely full of the other; and here is one thing, at least, that is gone from the realms of the _not-quite's_ and _almost's_. He loves this mixture.

"But if you don't get us off this ship, you may lose both of us at the same time."

He sighs, deep from his bones, and they ache in synchrony with hers and Galactica's. He's so tired of allegory.

oOo

It's Tigh that stumbles upon him in full dress regalia, and he reeks of alcohol. Maybe. It might be him instead.

"Can't imagine giving this ship up," he says gruffly. His fingers linger on a Six's face before he removes them. "Can't imagine all these faces on cylon walls."

There is such incongruity among every action, or non action; such reversals among even these.

"Neither can I," Bill replies.

"How's Laura?" Saul asks; and Bill can't help but burst into spasms of wheezing not-quite-laughs that resonate in his chest and radiate outward. He's going to have a headache.

"Gods, Saul," he says; "What a family we make."

His almost-brother takes in the candles burning low and the faces burning out, and repeats, "What a family."

oOo

It won't be until Kara admits that no, she doesn't know what she is, that Bill realizes that there was never any credence in defining something as less than it is. Something either is, or isn't; and he discards the fallacy he's been following all these months at that same moment.

"Never forget it_,_" he tells Kara, and something shifts in her eyes. She nods with the gravity of it all.

At some point those dividing lines become breaking points, and there is no choice but to obliterate them. He begins at the wall with a picture of Hera Agathon, but he has no intention of stopping there. For too long they've separated the past into _before_ from _after_, when they've been reaching the point of critical mass, where nothing matters but _now_ and _later._

_We are a product of our decisions_, he thinks; but knows they can only lay so much claim to the future, even if that future is death.

He draws a red line down the deck with his daughter. She and his son flank him in support. His wife dresses herself in clothes of another life and a wig of yet another, and leaves an abandoned sickbay to wander abandoned halls and walk down that same line toward him.

He turns around afterward to see his family behind him, and it is this image that strikes him: wife steadied by daughter, arms around waists and hand in hand.

It's been an exercise in becoming, and they have become.

oOo

He's making lists of lists to be made of things to be done before _Galactica_ is abandoned for safety and stripped for supplies. He thinks of the pictures on the wall and an empty spot he will never have to fill very soon with a picture he simply does not have.

It's a mess of contradictions, and he doesn't bother to try to keep them straight anymore.

Tigh and Lee arrived long ago, to keep him company in presence, if not in words. They sit in silence. It feels like a wake.

They cannot hope for remembrance past this.

Saul claps him on the back, and doesn't say a word as he leaves with Ellen and Chief. Laura wheezes in his ear as he carries her across solid earth and bright fields, an hour and a half before he buries her; and he can feel her smile ghost against his temple. Lee and Kara do not cry as they wish him well, hands in salutes against hearts or empty air.

He thinks of hurricane glass, the faithful with their votives, a wall littered with the memories of a few abandoned faces. There is grief here, but there is also acceptance. He sees it in the sunlight and feels it in the wind. There is morning, and there is evening, and there is the weight of a thousand things lifting away from his soul, one by one.

He thinks, _this is it_; and it is.


End file.
